Medical outcomes often depend upon the timeliness of initiating care. This is particularly true of severe injuries, where such timeliness is referred to as a patient's so-called "golden hour" within which medical intervention is most effective at saving lives.
Natural disasters and combat, which can produce great needs for such medical interventions, often take place in remote locations far away from hospitals or overwhelm the capacities of local care facilities. Rapid transport of patients can expand the range of available facilities, but the deployment of mobile medical facilities to the areas of need is sometimes the only or most effective way of dispensing timely medical care.
Mobile medical facilities take many forms from trailers to tents. U.S. Pat. No. 5,236,390 to coinventor Young discloses a fixed-walled mobile medical unit that is deployable by either air or ground transports. The mobile medical unit can be deployed alone or in combination with similar medical units to provide a variety of medical care specialties including surgery, emergency care, intensive care, pre- and post-operation care, as well as multi-bed wards.
Although such flexibility of purpose is important for dealing with the wide variety of medical needs on battlefields or sites of disasters, flexibility of capacity is also important for dealing with sudden influxes of patients. For this reason, applicants have devised a new umbilicus system that greatly expands the capability of mobile medical units to provide continuous care to multiple patients.